The ninth Symposium Hellenisticum was held in Haus Rissen at Hamburg, 23–28 July 2001 under the sponsorship of Hamburg University. Nine of the ten papers presented here are revised versions of drafts distributed to the participants in advance and discussed at the meetings; Bobzien's paper could not be presented at the conference and the editors are pleased to be able to include it. The final versions of all the papers bear the mark of much discussion, reflection and revision over the months following the conference.

The participants at the Symposium (and their affiliations at the time) were: Keimpe Algra (University of Utrecht), James Allen (University of Pittsburgh), Julia Annas (University of Arizona), Catherine Atherton (Oxford University), Jonathan Barnes (University of Geneva), Gábor Betegh (Central European University, Budapest), David Blank (University of Reading), Susanne Bobzien (Oxford University), Tad Brennan (Yale University), Charles Brittain (Cornell University), Myles Burnyeat (Oxford University), Walter Cavini (University of Bologna), Sten Ebbesen (University of Copenhagen), Theodor Ebert (Erlangen University), Dorothea Frede (Hamburg University), Nikolai Grintser (Moscow State University), Christoph Horn (Bonn University), Frédérique Ildefonse (University of Paris), Anna Maria Ippolo (University of Rome), Brad Inwood (University of Toronto), André Laks (University of Lille), Anthony Long (University of California), Gretchen Reydam-Schils (Notre Dame University), David Sedley (Cambridge University), Ineke Sluiter (University of Leiden), Gisela Striker (Harvard University), Alexander Verlinsky (University of St Petersburg), Hermann Weidemann (Münster University).